Dramaturgy & Direction

Dramaturg
Oh What a Beautiful Morning
Fight With a Stick
2019

Fight With a Stick turns its gaze on the iconic musical Oklahoma!  Boasting 800 productions a year, Oklahoma’s cultural legacy refuses to die. In Oh What a Beautiful Morning! we radically reinvent one of the most powerful theatre forms of our time — the American Musical — and one of the most enduring of those musicals.

Not a critique but a journey into the hidden corners of this enduring work. We ask ourselves who we are in relation to this endlessly produced musical? 500 licensed productions a year! What's the enduring appeal? Can this be anyone's story? Can it be ours? Fight With a Stick’s company of theatre artists, composers, video artists and choreographers dive deep into the sensory world that made the musical an instrument of American national identity building, but also an inspiration to generations of musical theatre fans. As always the company messes with states of perception to draw out what is lurking in the background — the cornfield, the sky, the sounds of the landscape. 

In partnership with the Magnetic North Festival.

Dramaturg & Creative Collaborator
A Vista
Fight With a Stick
2018/19

Fight With a Stick presents A Vista, the ultimate theatre experience of making the background the main performer. Over three nights in March 2019, dozens of painted backdrops become the main attraction as the company works the antique hemp-rope rigging system to animate the beautifully painted settings. Up to fifteen backdrops are in action at one time, each one playing off the next in a unique visual choreography of canvass, pipe, rope, sound and lights. 

During the three-day event, a “crew” of performers and designers animate 45 backdrops working to partner with the collective movement possibilities of the hemp house rigging system and the drops it holds. Each evening will focus on a different formal elements of the painted backdrops. The drops are openly handled and revealed in an ever-changing installation sequence in which no transition or backdrop is given more attention than any other.

Dramaturg & Associate Director
the earth, that is sufficient
The Welders
2018/19

Part theatre, part ritual, part epic journey, the earth, that is sufficient is a contemplative inquiry into the precarity of human relationships to extraction, consumption, and power.  the earth, that is sufficient is an iterative performance project that conceptualizes theatre-making as an ecology, and asks audiences to consider the braided legacy of our past and the infinite possibilities we might stitch into a shared future. The iterative piece is told through the eyes of Lucy, the australopithecus, the 3.2 million year old hominid fossil. She speaks of the earth’s vast history and her relationship to lands, place, and time. With her, we wonder, “when a body has been turned into an object, where does it find rest?”

Guest Dramaturg
Lame Is…
Sick + Twisted Theatre
2018

Sick + Twisted is a theatre company dedicated to creating work exploring the experience of living with a disability. Lame Is... confronts assumptions about disability and subverts expectations. Through multidisciplinary works we celebrate our exceptional bodies and brains. 

Dramaturg & Collaborating Director
Setting Bones
Kalik (Anoushka Ratnarajah, Kamee Abrahamian, lee williams boudakian), PTC
2017

When their mother and grandmother suddenly die, three estranged siblings are forced to come together and pack up their childhood home. As the siblings sort through the artifacts of their family’s herstories, they are forced to confront the legacies of displacement, cultural erasure, and fragmentation that have haunted them for generations. In turn, they must rediscover one another and their desires for belonging, understanding and love. Setting Bones was developed with the assistance of PTC (Playwrights Theatre Centre) as part of the Fringe New Play Prize.